The song is a tribute to Emily Dickenson, taking some of her public domain poetry and adding original lyrics. The singer concludes Emily changed his life by teaching him to see things in a much different way.

I played hooky one morning, and drove to Amherst, happily arriving on time at the Dickinson house. The door was opened by a pretty UMASS co-ed, and I shortly realized I was the sole participant on the tour, not exactly a visit to Graceland where I would have been in a crowd, but who cares? This was Emily’s home.

About thirty years ago an editor I knew told me to lose all those dreaded little words in my prose, the words making my work dull. He said I should always write around: is, was, that, and had. Today I call them ‘wasisms.’ But thirty years ago, I responded the way my...

The singer has an epiphany in this song – where he feared death all his life, he comes to see it as an enhancing event at the end, comparable to a lion who comes to whisk him to a better state of being. He realizes he should mount the back of this graceful, forgiving beast, and learns he himself is the ‘greatest’ entity in his own life, but conversely also the ‘least’ entity in the panorama of the universe.

A Ka Inside a Pyramid Ramose circa 1350 BCE.
My heart floats in the ibis jar on top
my brains and liver, all my organs mixed
together like a fetal mass . . .

and so I am back
at the womb, a time when my interior ingredients
floated indistinguishable from my exterior.

When I gain another chance at breathing,
I think I will create a creature
whose interior thoughts are more visible
to its fellows, for I now understand
most strife between us breathing ones
comes from misread intentions. READ ON

Poem related to Joan of Arc (1412-1431) earned, in the words of Louis Kossuth, an imposing distinction: since the writing of human history began, she is the only person, of either sex, who has ever held supreme command of the military forces of a nation at the age of seventeen. Although she achieved many victories for her beloved Dauphin, by age nineteen she had been tried for heresy, then burned at the stake. She was also the only person in history ever canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church who had once been executed as a heretic by the very same church.

Enfold is a contemporary folk album by Joan in the Fires, featuring Jessie Doyle. It combines the lyrics of poet Ward Kelley with imaginative melodies to produce a truly unique folk listening experience.

15 songs take the listener on a voyage through a Wild Mouse amusement park ride to the poets Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson to the Book of Proverbs to ancient Rome and finally to the Secret of Life, a tongue-in-cheek look at the world’s religion where the singer laments she is theologically abused. Interspaced throughout the album are new but more conventional folk songs and topics.

One thing is for certain, the listener will come away with a unique folk experience!